VMware vExpert is a non technical award granted by a special committee every year. It is a special award because there is no exam or anything like that. VMware judges give it for individuals who have demonstrated significant contributions to the community and share their expertise with others. This means different kinds of activities like blogging, sharing the knowledge by other channels or social media as well as public speakers, book authors, CloudCred task writing, script writers, VMUG leaders and VMTN…

Recently I received quite interesting question – what is the supported maximum quantity for tags in vCenter 6.0U2 ? Malignant author of the question is a good friend of mine and VMware administrator in one person. He ssked about tags limit because he want to use them to provide more information about each of its production VM’s – roughly speaking need to create about 20000 tags. I thought ok., give me couple seconds to verify this, and looked fast in…

Going through our list of articles about new features in vSphere 6.5 the last one is vSphere Update Manager for vCenter Server Appliance. Since vSphere 6.5 it’s fully embedded and integrated with vCenter Server Appliance with no Windows dependencies. It means that vCenter Server Appliance delivers now Update Manager as an optional service similar to Auto Deploy, etc. Since vSphere 6.5 there is no longer possible to connect Update Manager instance that is installed on a Windows Server machine with vCenter Appliance….

Couple days ago I hit strange issue with vcenter 6.x appliance update process. Attempting to upgrade vCenter server 6.0 U1 to 6U2, encounter following error: Installation of component VMware Postgres 9.3.9.0 Installer failed with error code ‘3010’. The installation rolled back after clicking at OK button. I was able to find following KB 2144389 with a similar issue but the workaround didn’t work. After rolling back to a snapshot before the update, we also tried to update vCenter to 6U…

Today my colleague (vmware administrator) asked me a small favour – help to perform RCA (root cause analyze) – related to one of production VM that had recently a problem. VM for some reason was migrated (collegue stands that it happened without administrative intervention) to other ESXi host that do not have proper network config for this vm – this caused outage for whole system. I asked about issue time and we went deeper into logs in order to find…

Recenly, I found a strange issue with my Customer’s VDP backup. There is VDP version 6.1.3 and vSphere 6.0 Update 2. The problem is that the backup jobs of a few virtual machines got stuck at 92%. The state was present for more than week at the first try, untill it was manually cancelled. There is a way to check the actual status of backup via CLI. So did I. Unfortunatelly the command mccli activity show –active displayed fallowing information: I went through…

VMware PowerCLI is a powerful tool for daily task for every Admin. The pure console is most commonly used. However, there are a few alternatives to the simple console which could make the use of PowerCLI even more handy. I’ll describe them shortly in the next a few lines. Powershell ISE script editor, which provides a better user experience. It’s divided into two panes. The upper pane is for viewing/editing script files, and the lower pane is for running individual commands…

In my last post about Infinio Accelerator we introduced product and basics about it. Now it is time to go more deep – how this server side cache is working ? Infinio’s cache inserts server RAM (and optionally, flash devices) transparently into the I/O stream. By dynamically populating server-side media with the hottest data, Infinio’s software reduces storage requirements to a small fraction of the workload size. Infinio is built on VMware’s vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework. This enables administrators…

Shared storage performance and characteristics (iops,latency) is crucial for overall vSphere platform performance and users satisfaction. In the advent of ssd and memory cache solutions we have many options to chose in case storage acceleration (local ssd, array side ssd , server side ssd). Lets discuse further server side caching – act of caching data on the server. Data can be cached anywhere and at any point on the server that makes sense. It is common to cache commonly used…

The architecture of auto deploy has changed in vSphere 6.5, one of the main difference is the ImageBuilder build in vCenter and the fact that you can create image profiles through the GUI instead of PowerCLI. That is really good news for those how is not keen on PowerCLI. But let’s go throgh the new configuration process of Auto Deploy. Below I gathered all the necessary steps to configure Auto Deploy in your environment. Enable Auto Deploy…